Random journalising: another case of journalists misrepresenting stats

Ben Goldacre highlighted another case of statistics used badly in the Guardian on Saturday: the claim that Britain’s happiest places have been mapped by scientists, according to the BBC and many newspapers.

Erm, says Ben Goldacre, there’s a slight problem with that. He shows how sampling has yet again been misused by journalists. “This entire news story was based on nothing more than random variation,” he reports.

“This is called sampling error, and it quietly undermines almost every piece of survey data ever covered in any newspaper.”

When Goldacre talked to the scientist behind the research, Dr Dimitris Ballas, he said: “I tried to explain issues of significance to the journalists who interviewed me. Most did not want to know.”

‘Ithika’, originally flagged this up, posting in the Bad Science forum and has written about it at dougalstanton.net.  APGaylard and Gimpy have also blogged about it on their sites.

Guardian blogger calls for other London bloggers

One of the Guardian’s newest bloggers, writer Dave Hill, is to use the platform to promote, and interact with, other external blogs.

“Blogging offers the chance to fill the void,” London blogger Dave Hill writes at his new Guardian.co.uk home.  In an attempt to nourish connections with other bloggers, he’s asking for people to send him their favourite London blogs.

Prior to this blog he blogged at London Mayor & More, and his other blogs Clapton Pond and Big Britain are still active.

10 magazine - free in your Guardian today, but £8.86 online

A funny little magazine fell out of the Guardian onto Journalism.co.uk’s lap this morning: a ’special mini-edition’ of 10 magazine. So un-Guardian like that Journalism.co.uk had to pop into WH Smith to check another copy, to clarify that it hadn’t in fact dropped out of the sky.

No, it was in the Guardian. One end of the mini-magazine is men’s content, turn it the other way and the other end is women’s, with a feature on ‘Ten looks from the old and wiser’ that tells us ‘all of these handsome folk are 100 years old or more. There are some nice great-grandmas and lovely great-grandpas. With age comes wisdom…’

Is this a new promotion from the Guardian or has it been done before?

Apparently, there have been 15 issues of the men’s and 28 issues of the women’s mag that have been purchased by consumers at £4.95 a pop. We’d like to hear from people who have read it in full.

The magazine’s website is minimalist, but you can subscribe over at the magazine cafe.

Journalism.co.uk is putting an early birthday request in for a single copy: online, the women’s magazine is priced £10.96, and the men’s is £8.86. Type ‘Ten’ in the search box, under the category men’s and women’s interest to find it.

Wires in a twist - why you should always check your news agency feeds

As we’ve blogged before, Nick Davies’ recent book, Flat Earth News, uses findings from a specially-commissioned team of researchers at Cardiff University to show national newspapers’ dependency on press agencies.

After an investigation of 2,207 domestic news articles and their sources over two random weeks, the research team reported that 60 per cent of ‘quality print-stories’ (carried by the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail and the Times) came wholly or largely from a combination of PR releases and news agency copy.

The dangers of dependency on wire copy were illustrated on journalist Jo Wadsworth’s blog this morning: she describes how yesterday her site’s biggest hits and highest comments were on ‘several month-old stories about Premiership teams,’ which can be viewed here.

It looks like it was a technical error (she blames gremlins for playing havoc with the paper’s PA national football feeds), but it shows how manual checking on automatic feeds can never be replaced.

Guardian: Journalistic privilege in an era of blogging

Guardian relaunches blogs and commenting features

The Guardian is moving its blogs onto its new platform, bringing them in line with the rest of the recently redesigned site.

The move will be completed in two stages starting with 14 titles, including its Lost in Showbiz and news blogs, an announcement on the Inside Guardian blog said. The remaining sites will move over next month.

Once switched the blogs will boast new colours and design features (see the right-hand screenshot below), including improved navigation and links to the rest of Guardian.co.uk.

Keywords linking blog posts to related content across the site will be added - a feature previously unavailable on the blogs platform.

Blogs will also be relocated to their sections - e.g. the politics blog in the politics channel - rather than housed in a separate blogs section.

The new blogs will also share features introduced across the rest of the redesigned site, including the option to share posts by Digg, del.icio.us etc, and a widget showing the most-linked to Guardian content.

Blog posts will now also be included in the site’s search.

Changes to the commenting function on the site’s blogs have also been made - the biggest change being the introduction of user profiles.

“For a long time, we and many other sites operated a content-driven model which meant that user comments were only associated with - and displayed alongside - a particular content item. The creation of user profiles reveals our growing community-driven approach, recognising that just as every guardian.co.uk author gets a contributor page in which their contributions are archived so that their participation can be explored across topics and over time, so should our users,” said Meg Pickard, head of communities and user experience for Guardian.co.uk, in a blog post

Additional features will be added to user profiles over time, added Pickard, and experiments with the layout of comments beneath blog posts are ongoing.

Basic formatting, such as creating block quotes and links, is also now possible on blog post comments.

The new features have previously been trialled on the site’s Comment Is Free platform and use social media firm Pluck’s commenting technology.

Guardian was wrong to buy Madeleine McCann keywords on Google

The Guardian has admitted it mistakenly bought the keywords Madeleine McCann from Google.

By wrongly purchasing the keywords a link to the paper’s coverage of Madeleine’s disappearance appeared in a column of sponsored results when a search for her name was made on Google.

The newspaper has now taken down the link and has reviewed the list of keywords it owns, Marc Sands, marketing director for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

The paper’s purchase of the words Madeleine McCann was criticised by Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, on his personal blog, who said the practice showed the paper was ‘desperate’ to hold onto its position as the UK’s most popular newspaper website according to the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) traffic figures.

“The purchase of terms is a way of getting your stories, at a cost, in front of people. It’s absolutely what everyone does all the time,” said Sands.

[advert]A search for the terms shows the Mirror currently owns the keywords McCanns cleared, while a Google search for other keywords, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, show the the Sun and Times have also purchased phrases from Google.

“It is a way of getting it [news] distributed to people who have expressed an interest in that subject,” he added.

“The issue with the Madeleine McCann keywords is an interesting one. It’s like advertising, but not really: the only reason you and I search for a term is because we are interested in that term.”

The practice had been criticised in the blog post, he said, because of the Guardian’s previous stance on the coverage of the McCann story.

“The Guardian in the past has been very critical of the coverage of Madeleine McCann, saying it has been salacious and misleading. What the person in the blog post is saying is that Madeleine McCann is not to be treated in this way, so what on earth are they doing buying keywords?”

The issue led the paper to review its list of current keywords to assess ‘what news is okay to do it with and what isn’t', he said.

The Guardian buys thousands of Google keywords relating to current news stories every week, he added. It currently owns the keywords ’stamp duty’, ‘university league tables’ and ‘post office closures’.

“Madeleine McCann slipped through the net. You don’t approve all these [keyword purchases] every day. We would have had to say to the company that buys the keywords for us: never buy the keywords for Madeleine McCann,” he said.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation of newspaper websites is a ‘new area’ for publishers, added Sands.

“Everyone is working their way through and trying to remain true exactly to the principles of what they’re doing, but also to ensure that they’re getting read.”

A lesson in SEO from Charlie Brooker

Following the surge of comments generated by Charlie Brooker’s Comment is Free article, he’s asking this week what impact search engine optimisation could have on the quality of journalism online.

To take his point to the extreme Brooker gives us a fully SEO-ready article complete with celebrity names, certain pharmaceutical brands and political links (I’d mention them by name but that would start a kind of SEO vicious circle for this post).

As one commenter points out, Brooker’s got it spot on - at the time of writing his article occupies the top five slots when you Google the key SEO terms shown below:

Jokes aside - Telegraph.co.uk’s Shane Richmond has given us some insight into the site’s SEO strategy, would be good to hear what might be going on with the Guardian.

paidContent: BBC website should be reduced, says Yahoo

Responses published to Ofcom’s public service broadcasting review include calls from Yahoo to scale down bbc.co.uk.

The Guardian’s response said there was no reason for the BBC’s ’special broadcasting provisions’ to extend online.

links for 2008-06-25

• Video: Jeff Jarvis and the Future of Journalism part 2 | Media | guardian.co.uk
  It’s a link economy, stupid

  In part two of his seminar to the Guardian, as part of the Future of Journalism series, Jeff Jarvis argues that links are worth more than content

  (tags: guardian jarvis)
• YouTube home to nearly half web clips watched in UK, comScore reveals | Media | guardian.co.uk
  YouTube accounted for almost 50% of the 3.5bn video clips viewed by UK web users in March, well ahead of the 1.2% share of the BBC and its iPlayer service, according to research firm comScore.
  (tags: youtube comscore)
• Preview: CNET’s new, improved look | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com
  The new CNET home page includes a carousel highlighting several stories across News, Reviews, and Downloads, as well as an integrated video player for CNET TV content
  (tags: cnet revamp)
• Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution | Greenslade | guardian.co.uk
  The debate over blogging’s usefulness to journalism tends to get stuck in a cul de sac, mainly because too few people - well, too few journalists - treat it seriously.
  (tags: greenslade blogging)
• Interview: Rob Grimshaw, MD, FT.com: New Niches, Pinker Pages, No More Subscribers | paidContent:UK
  Paid Content UK chats with FT.com head
  (tags: FT Rob Grimshaw)
• IPC buys Mousebreaker website | Media | guardian.co.uk
  Magazine publisher IPC Media has bought the casual gaming website Mousebreaker in an effort to increase its access to an audience of young male internet users.
  (tags: ipc)